June 2006: The Rise of the Liberal Junta Okay, I know the issues have fallen away lately – or to put it more, erm, accurately, there haven’t really been any – but my computer was broken for a bit and besides, hey, it’s been summer. Everything shuts down at summer, that’s just how it works: all our politicians take long holidays from their busy schedule of sitting in the Dáil snoring and take it easy for a bit; television networks throughout Ireland and Ingerland decide that it’s just not worth the bother of putting on decent programmes for a change; the radio gives up even the vaguest pretence of actually playing decent music, and puts on “summer” tracks instead; quite possible when even Roisín Ingle starts wishing there were more interesting things to do, so that she can write at great length about how she couldn’t be bothered doing them. And if all that wasn’t exciting enough, it turns out that Israel can go and start bombing random countries at any minute. It’s all gloriously chirpy stuff, innit? It’s always great to hear the usual fascists-pretending-to-be-real-people try and justify the whole “there’s terrorists in the country so let’s go and bomb it” tactic – the favourite one is We Live In A Changed World, although as far as I can remember the IRA used to explode a bomb in Ingerland every other week when I was younger and even Maggie the Big-Nosed Lunatic didn’t think it was a good idea to carpet-bomb our fair nation in retaliation. Good job too, you might say. The only problem is the other side of the debate, i.e. the ones that Americans call “liberal” although that’s not actually what liberal means but they’re yanks and what would they know, are so pull-your-own-hair-out annoying that they make you want to start advocating ceremonial baby-eating just to piss them off. All very well talking about irritating concepts like “human dignity”, but if it means people are going to start identifying you with Fintan O’Toole, then why would you even want to bother? It’s like when you’re younger and still have vaguely left-wing leanings, but after meeting the Socialist Worker’s Party for three seconds you just want to go and vote Fianna Fáil if the alternatives are that fucking annoying. The solution’s obvious, really; the “liberals” (or decent people who give a fuck about other people, as some people call them) need to toughen up. Since all the right-wing nutcases like to claim they’re speaking for the man on the street, we need to be a bit more forthright and just say that the man on the street’s a blithering idiot. It’s vitally important to carry this through to its logical conclusion, where anyone who votes in Big Brother automatically loses their vote in the General Election, people are forced to sign up to a sex offenders-type list if they buy a James Blunt album, and special vampiric technology is used to ensure that Orlando Bloom has his reflection taken away thereby ensuring that no-one can ever film him again. It’s all about being creative, people. Corrections to the Last Issue: - The reason the opening to “You Are Always On My Mind” by The Pet Shop Boys didn’t transfer well onto paper is because it didn’t go “BAM! Bam-bam-bam bam-BAM!”, it went “BAM! Ba-bam ba-bam bam BAM!”. That’s cleared that up then. - And look, I’d only heard the Sandi Thom song twice by the time I wrote the review and was still a little confused by its existence. I now fully accept that it was truly abysmal in just about every way anyone could possibly imagine, and what’s more I would like to hereby state that having been trapped in the prison of daytime radio and heard it more times than anyone should have to bear, it now seems slightly less palatable to me than the sight of someone trying to decapitate a three year-old girl with a small hatchet while simultaneously being sodomized by a large hybrid creature that is half-elephant half-housefly. I feel I’ve let everyone down and the only way I can atone is by building a time machine, going back in time, finding Sandi Thom’s mother, and explaining to her how vital it is that she pursue contraception as a lifestyle choice. Unfortunately I’m having trouble with the flux capacitor, but I’m working on it. - Rihanna’s last single was not, in fact, blatantly ripping off Tainted Love. It was in fact affectionately quoting it, as it does contain a sample of the song in question just before the chorus. This doesn’t fail to answer the key question – why Rihanna should refer to how she tosses at night, which sounds both aesthetically unpleasing and biologically questionable. But I thought I should mention it anyway because it was pointed out to me by a person who is always desperate to see her name in a public forum and asked for an acknowledgement. So here goes; thanks very much to Lola Hallund.
	television House Which is great. Sort of. Well actually, it’s very ordinary in many ways, but it’s still great for the obvious reason. Which I’ll get to in a bit. The formula’s actually pretty standard for That Sort Of Thing at this stage; it’s a medical-type drama that was on Channel 6 for a while, in which people came in to a team of doctors with an excitingly new type of disease, and over the cause of a slightly melodramatic hour in which lots of people look bothered about stuff, they fix it. There are a lot of characters who are all Really Nice Underneath It All, including the usual businesslike manager, the mentor chap who is gruff and impersonal, the pretty boy (incongruously Australian, in this case) and the girl-who-really-has-a-crush-on-the-gruff-bloke. So far, so clichéd; this is the kind of thing that Americans like to think is real-life drama, although of course nobody involved in American television actually has the faintest idea how real life works (disclaimer – this refers to real life here. Americans are essentially from another planet, so maybe they really do live like this. It’s a terrifying prospect but there you go). But the nub of the matter is Hugh Lawrie, and that’s more or less all there is to it. You might know Hugh from all sorts of things, in which he almost always plays the same slightly-goofy slightly-spikey terribly-English-chap, in a way that’s usually pretty enjoyable without ever coming across as… well… proper acting. It’s a revelation that, once he ditches the English accent, Hugh suddenly morphs from being Hugh Lawrie, Stephen Fry’s mate, to Hugh Lawrie the Best Television Actor You’ve Ever Seen In Anything Ever. His performance in this is astonishing, taking a character who could easily have been a Doctor-Cox-From-Scrubs type caricature and turns him into someone genuinely dark and compelling; and in the meantime, carrying this ultimately rather slight programme on his back. This is what gives House its edge – it’s actually got real darkness in it, in the shape of a painkiller-addicted sociopath who actually does seem like a dark and tragic character rather than the usual softened version you so often get. When the core of the show is so good, it’s difficult to go too wrong with the rest. It’s easy to forget that medical dramas are by their nature about important stuff – you know, living and dying and all that sort of thing – so the trick is remembering that without laying it on too thick. House limits itself to one case per programme, so the stories are actually involving rather than the sort of excuse for having some blood squirt everywhere whenever the soap-opera get boring that we’re used to from ER. Admittedly it does involve watching three or four doctors refer to diatheminous involiation of the volvic gland and then looking agitated, but this still makes more sense to the average viewer than The West Wing, so that’s all right. So essentially it’s throwaway but entertaining, elevated above its station by the bravura central performance. Channel 6 were stupid enough to schedule this opposite The Street and The Sopranos, but maybe when it comes back for a new season (because it’s been finished for ages now… like I said, it’s summer) maybe they’ll be smarter about things. It’ll be worth a look when they do. The View / Newsnight Review There are some things that you just can’t ban, obviously. Under the new snobbery laws it will finally be possible to stop Michael Baine making films under the Please Stop Fucking The Rotting Corpse Of Pop Culture Act 2008, and to ban the word “demographic” post-haste. But clever people can be as stupid and as wrong as everyone else, so things will slip through the net; there will always be people who like to believe that Lost In Translation isn’t shit, and talk of A History Of Violence as “David Cronenberg’s masterpiece”, and that’s all there is to it. We can obviously start scanning newspaper articles and remove all the bits in which the reviewer starts talking about how hard it is to bring children to an Art Gallery while ostensibly reviewing the latest exhibition by Donatella Guerina (entitled “Vital Detritus”), and we can force Phillip French to stop “reviewing” films by giving us a full-page ninety-year history of the automobile’s portrayal in cinema before mentioning in the last paragraph that Cars is out this week, under the Just Get On With It Act 2009 (sorry, but there’ll be a heavy programme of legislature and it’ll take a while to get round to it); but even so, lots of people will still believe that The Squid and the Whale is clever and there’s not a lot you can do to stop them. Except shout at them, obviously. You will always find these people on Newsnight Review or The View (our Oirish knock-off). They are the people who will try and convince you that Jose Gonzales is revolutionary. They will wax lyrical about the emotional depth of Six Feet Under. Oh well. But… But it’s more fun, somehow. Newsnight Review is obviously the superior programme, just because its panellists are better. It’s got Mark Kermode sometimes, who’s always good value even if he tries to be constructive on this and therefore isn’t as much fun as usual. It’s got Tom Paulin sometimes, who will slump in his chair like a pile of old clothes and deliver incomprehensible symbological analysis of The Phantom Menace before mentioning at the end that it’s bloody awful. It’s got Germaine Greer, sometimes, who’s usually wrong but in an interesting way; and then there’s a whole bunch of other people of varying quality. But here’s the thing; they’re all nuts. They’re completely mad. Seeing them analyse Cars is like taking Prince Charles to a Marilyn Manson gig – clearly pointless, but really funny. The View just isn’t as entertaining, because we don’t really do “eccentric” or “batty” in Ireland. In fact, half the guests on The View just seem to be random people who someone dragged off the street and asked to go and watch a film or two. The other half are Niall Stokes, and it’s hard to know who’s more irritating. Ever since they stuck up for Revenge of the Sith I’ve had a soft spot for it, but it still encapsulates the problem with Irish liberal-intellectual-types; they’re too damn normal by half. If you have yer average punter talking about someone sticking a plaster cast of Johann Sebastian Bach up his girlfriend’s gee as an intriguing dialogue on the juxtaposition between feminine expression and the male-dominated interpretation of female sexuality, then they just invite a Glasgow Kiss. If such people look like they went to the English Prep School of Tunki-Likke where they were made to serve their Prefect’s breakfast from between their butt-cheeks before going out and snogging a platypus, on the other hand, then it becomes strangely entertaining. If only it wasn’t on Friday night, it would just be perfect viewing. Ed Anyone who’s actually bothered reading – well… anything I ever wrote, really – will know how much I hate Ally McBeal. I should actually clarify the depth of my feelings here – people say “I hate cabbage”, for example, so the phrase sometimes loses its oomph. My hatred for Ally McBeal is biblical. I hate it even now, with a burning fervour that ignores the fact that it hasn’t actually been on telly for years. I hate the sculpted quirkiness of all the characters; I hate the sentimental plinky-plonk piano music they played over everything; I hate Calista Flockhart; I hate her parents, simply for giving her a name like “Calista Flockhart” and thereby ensuring she would grow up into the soul-destroying witch she undoubtedly is; I hate the sight of affluent thirty-somethings whining and pretending to have deep-seated emotional problems; I hate it for reinforcing just about every nasty thing about every nasty element of Western society. Most of all, I hate the navel-gazing tweeness of it, the assumption that a bunch of lawyers arguing about whether someone should be fired because they wear a wig is in some way profound and important, the breathtaking way that the world it inhabitants never, ever looks beyond the Evian-filled water cooler and the trendy wine-bar below the well-manicured office – and all this is presented as “real life”. It’s not “real life”, it’s a cheap Japanese copy. So believe me, when I say “I hate it” I mean it in the old-fashioned way. Think Jews and that little Austrian bloke with a moustache and you’ll come close to understanding how deep this runs. Or, to put it another way – if you read in the newspaper about Calista Flockhart being found with her entire nervous system strung out across her living room in such a way that it forms a rudimentary harp that can be played by strumming it with her still-bloody clavicle, then just put the police on to me and save the honest taxpayer some money. But; Ally McBeal did, in some way, give rise to Ed. Which for a while was pretty good. Look, even Nigel Lawson gave birth to Nigella; we can’t predict where these things come from. Really, Ed’s true progenitor was Picket Fences – another David E. Kelley (grrrr) show from way back, set in a nice town with nice people doing nice things, a bit like Northern Exposure but with the eccentricity replaced by enough sugar to keep Greencore afloat. It was a horrible, conservative show about how lovely it was to live in the country, and was strangely watchable as a satire (even though it didn’t know it was one). Although Lauren Holly never got her kit off, which made the whole thing worthless. Anyway, much later, Ed came along. It wasn’t by David E. Kelley but took elements of Picket Fences and Ally McBeal and stuck them together; the small-town setting on one side, the sculpted quirkiness on the other. And the result was a genuinely engaging show – it worked because it didn’t bother giving its characters ambitions or morals, but instead just had them enjoying a few beers with each other every night or having impromptu games of American Football at three in the morning. It neatly avoided most of the clichés of That Sort Of Thing – yes Ed was a lawyer, but he worked in a bowling alley and lost most of his cases – and had some very witty scripting. I liked Ed. Even if it was… you know… nice. To my shock, it’s still running; Channel 4 are showing it around lunchtime. Dunno how many seasons in it is by now, but Ed’s Unrequited Love Who Loves Him Really (hey, every show needs to have one) is preparing to get married to someone else, so it must be a fair way in. And… it’s just awful. It’s unwatchable syrup-soaked mush. Plinky-plonk pianos? Check. Characters saying how much they love each other? Check. Great Unrequited Love Story that’s terminally boring? Check. Actually, the last one deserves special mention – unrequited love stories do not exist in people older than seventeen. People get it together or they don’t, and that’s it – which is one of the (very few) gloriously healthy elements of our faster-faster-faster society, really. Thanks to the profusion of sex-obsessed “empowered” women who’ve derived their ideas of feminism from Cosmopolitan, and young men who don’t actually realise that Swingers wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously, nobody’s sexually frustrated or uptight enough to moon over someone for years and years any more. You watch the Golden Couple that feature in Ed and rather than rooting for those kids to get together, you just want to slap them and tell them to get on with it for fuck’s sake. While a grain of Ally McBeal was responsible for this show’s initial goodness, it’s now taken over and turned it into something immensely obnoxious. Watching pretty perfect-teeth secure white people going oh-woe-is-me over their existential angst is just unconscionably ugly, and that’s all there is to it. The sense of fun has evaporated from the show, and what’s left behind is thoroughly noxious; and it’s all David E. Kelley’s fault. One of the first actions of the Junta should be to execute him – or better yet, just force the fucker to watch his own programmes for eight hours a day until he starts eating his own liver. Oh well, at least Aaron Spelling had the good grace to die on us, so things are looking up in that respect at least.
	film Hard Candy Yay, here’s what we want. It’s what they call an “exploitation film”, which is an entirely meaningless phrase that has passed into Film Critic Vocabulary along with “arthouse” and anything Phillip French says, but seems to mean taking a live issue of the day and using it as a prop to create a work of pure entertainment. Which is what other people call “storytelling”, but critics are just silly people. Except for me. Thing is, Exploitation Films (for I am technically a critic I suppose, and must therefore comply with the existing legislation) usually say as much as the Look At Me I Am A Proper Film issue-driven versions that are beloved among the current liberal classes who the Junta shall overthrow, and what’s more they usually say it less ponderously and also bother to create an interesting story while they’re doing it. The latest example was V For Vendetta, which was a good work of throwaway entertainment but actually had a lot to say about how we define terrorists and freedom fighters – far more so than all those silly dramas they had on the BBC which took great pains to introduce positive Islamic role-models and show the cultural differences between bunches of people that I don’t really remember because I’d nodded off. Now we have Hard Candy, which is about kiddy-fiddling and child sexuality and all that stuff. But it’s actually fun. No, seriously, it is. The storyline is a perfect example of minimalism. Old-ish guy and young-ish (i.e. fourteen years old, if I remember right) girl chat on the tinternet. They meet up and share a flirtation cup of hot chocolate. She convinces him to bring her back to his terribly stylish house in his terribly stylish car. At this point everything’s drifting in the direction of Lolita, particularly when Young Teenage Girl starts guzzling vodka and swinging around in her underwear. And then – and sadly this is pretty widely known so I feel fine about giving it away, although it’s actually a great big plot twist that they should have tried to keep secret – man takes a drink, gets dizzy, passes out, and wakes up tied to a chair with teenage girl threatening to make him pay for all his crimes. Yes, really. And the punishment she’s dishing out is nothing if not physically discomforting. Not to give it away, but men throughout the cinema will be crossing there legs and not caring whether it looks gay or not. The film is almost entirely carried by the two leads, both of whom are pretty much unknown but do a damn fine job of it. Yer One Who Plays The Girl is particularly wonderful – although she remains in a position of power throughout the movie, Yer One gives her a real vulnerability that stops it all becoming clichéd. Yer Man’s performance has been rather more overlooked, but he’s excellent here – he plays a nasty character but doesn’t lapse into playing A Villain, meaning that the viewer’s sympathies jump between one and the other as the film goes on. Some people have said it falls apart in the final reel – this really isn’t true, although it is a touch disappointing. Films like this work when they’re plausible, when the characters are acting like characters and everything just seems to be bobbing along like it would if it really happened. The last half hour or so is rather contrived, with some long-lost love (who I think is supposed to be a sort of presence who pervades the film, a bit like Godot, but is actually some woman who people keep mentioning for no apparent reason. By the way, I’ve always wanted to go to a theatre and shout “Go-Dot [phonetic pronunciation]! Where the fuck is Go-Dot [like people do with that Alice song by Smokie]?” halfway through, and I’m still waiting for a modern re-interpretation of Beckett which is called Go Dot Com, but nothing’s happened yet. Disappointingly, http://www.go.com/ has nothing to do with Beckett. Oh well) showing up and not doing much really, while the girl’s background starts to become a touch ridiculous and it all slips into melodrama. But the ending’s definitely not the disaster some tossers would have you believe, it’s just a touch disappointing in the context of the rest of the film. And that’s a good context, believe me. Hard Candy is one of the most enjoyable films of the year, a touch of old-school film-making which pushes a good concept through without over-complicated plotting or resorting to booms and bangs. If you missed it, the DVD will be worth the money. The Wind That Shakes The Barley Oh god. This really is a proper film. Worse still, it’s another film about Irrrreland, replete with nasty Brits and lots of people looking very serious while they sit around some fields, and women who insist on wrapping shawls around their heads for some reason. History lessons, people dying for their country (hairdressers were very patriotic back then), and That Woman From The Last Furlong. Oh, fuck off. Okay. That paragraph is complete nonsense from beginning to end, but since everyone else has been talking a whole load of crap about The Wind That Shakes The Barley I thought I’d join in. Part of the problem is that it’s directed by Ken Loach who always justifies his films in terms of politics, so it’s hardly surprising when you have assorted imbeciles using it in the same way. Even the luvly Irish Minister for Culture, John O’Donoghue, got in on the act by chortling about how the pesky Fine Gaelers wouldn’t like it, thereby proving that having John O’Donoghue as your Minister for Culture is a bit like having Idi Amin as your Minister for Justice (actually, it’s a bit like having Michael McDowell as your Minister for Justice). The letters pages have been a good place for people saying it argues for/against the anti/pro-treaty stance, or the confirms/explodes the myth of the necessity for violent struggle for Ireland’s independence. Yawn. The annoying thing about all this is that it stops people focusing on what they should be talking about – you know, the film – while they argue about whether it’s really historical accurate or whether Ken Loach is using the film to push forward his own take on the conflict (and the answer to those two questions are: it seem to be, mostly, and who gives a shit about the details; and yes, he is, because that’s what storytellers do). And the film is squarely magnificent. It’s beautifully shot and the performances are all great, particularly Cillian He’s-The-Greatest-Irish-Actor-Of-His-Generation-You-Know Murphy in the lead role. But it’s got that real naturalism and empathy with ordinary people that Ken Loach can do better than – well, anyone ever, really. It traces the War of Independence and then how that spilled over into the Civil War, with Murphy playing a reluctant recruit who slowly becomes a driven idealist who sees the Treaty as a betrayal of what he fought for. And part of the film’s genius is how it makes all this seem understandable – all of a sudden it makes sense that everyone was shocked at having to swear an Oath of Allegiance to the King, and the Civil War really does seem something that’s horrendously divisive and bitter. That’s not to say it’s a specifically Irish film – in spite of the setting it’s a universal story of what war does to people. When all those silly Brit writers described it as anti-British without having seen it they were obviously being thick as pigshit, but more so they’re just plain wrong. Yes, the British soldiers are horrendous, but there’s a key scene where one of them explodes with rage at Cillian Murphy – “these men fought at the Somme! They saw their friends blown to pieces before their eyes!” and their dehumanisation of the Paddies makes sense. Later in the film, the Free State soldiers search a house that during the War gave them shelter, and they gun down their former colleagues – the only way they can cope with these actions is simply to dehumanise their victims and give in to raw, stinking hate. Reviewing a film as a political propaganda piece is ultimately such a boring, joyless thing to do – and here it’s also uncalled for. The film shows understanding towards the anti-Treaty side, but that doesn’t mean you don’t just wish they’d stop fighting and have some peace. It isn’t a Marxist pamphlet, it’s a grand historical tragedy that’s overlaid against an equally moving personal tragedy (oh, did I mention that Loach takes the hoary old staple of putting two brothers on opposite sides of the conflict and that he does it without it ever seeming contrived or melodramatic? Well he does). What’s more, it puts the viewer in that period and actually makes sense of it all in a way that all those boring hours sat in Junior Cert history class never did. In terms of films about Ireland, it’s leagues ahead of anything else – and I liked Michael Collins, unfashionable as it may be to say so, but The Wind That Shakes The Barley makes it look like a fun pseudo-historical romp (because that’s what it is. And that’s why I like it, incidentally). It’s great, and it should be on the History syllabus. Well look, when I was at school they made me watch The Field. No, seriously. The sodding Field. And someone really has to stop the Reigning Irish Liberals from pretending that film isn’t complete shit. But this one is tremendous. It might not be Loach’s best film, but it is one of his better ones – and therefore one of the better films by anyone. It’s certainly the best film of the year so far. Go and see it.
	adverts Pepsi Okay, I’m not going to review a whole pile of ads because let’s face it this is already two months out of date and what would be the point, but Pepsi demanded my attention. It was that world cup advert, in which a bunch of superstars do tricks with a football in order to sell something or other – a relatively new genre that started with that advert when they all played a bunch of demons, that finished up with Eric Cantona turning up his collar, muttering “Au Revoir”, and sending a thunderous flaming shot into the back of the net. Which did at least show a certain creativity, and hey – Eric went on to become an actor, in which he plays – um – himself on various TV adverts. Good for him. The Pepsi advert is obviously intended to be German-themed, what with the world cup being there and all, so it featured Ronaldinho and his mates kicking around a bunch of bemused looking old Germans in lederhosen (because all Germans wear lederhosen really. You know they do) and just generally amusing themselves with their fancy tricks. And that, people, is pretty much it. No, really, it is. There’s no attempt to give it a team-of-beasts vs team-of-men rationale, they just sort of ponce about. Of course, Irish people are not the target audience because we have an instinctive distrust of fancy-dan footballers and most of us still think of Mick McCarthy the player with an indulgent smile, whereas showboaters like Mark Kennedy don’t hold much of a place in our affections – but even leaving that aside, there’s something weird about this. First up, the Germans look a little confused at the footballers behaviour and it’s hard to blame them – but who depicts Germans like this? Why not have them all as bespectacled suits with hatchet-like faces? Or Krazy Punk Rockers with blond mullets? Or even a bunch of Nazi soldiers? Okay, so the last one would be a touch offensive but dammit, if you’re going to stereotype then do it properly. Secondly – well, it’s an advert for Pepsi, which leads to numerous problems straight up. Pepsi’s horrible. The only reason it exists is because stupid parents buy it because they’ve got a lot of shopping to do and are incapable of differentiating between the different types of soft drink (a symptom of ageing that accompanies the menopause in women, and the need to trim nostril hair in public in men), whereupon they bring it home and are given a firm lecture by their children which does no good whatsoever because they’ll do the same thing again anyway. Nobody likes Pepsi. It’s muck. Which leads nicely to the nub of the matter – why in the name of arse are footballers advertising soft drinks anyway? The things are loaded with so much sugar that the club dieticians probably have them banned anyway, and maybe someone should mention that if you want to be a first-class athlete at the peak of your physical condition you really shouldn’t go near the stuff. What we need to do here is make sure that people can only advertise things that they actually use. So if you’re going to advertise Pepsi you have to live on it for thirty days, a la Supersize Me. I’m all for footballers advertising whatever they want, bad for them or not – we’d all prefer to see Damien Duff telling us the merits of Snakebite rather than Car Insurance – but there’s got to be some sort of comeback, right? I mean fuck it, if there’s going to be a rash of footballers advertising drinks that screw up your body chemistry, mess around with your energy levels and give you the urge to run around like a lunatic and shout at everything, then they should really be advertising alcohol. That would at least be something I could relate to.
	singles Nelly Furtado: Maneater Ah, Nelly Furtado. Isn’t she great? She’s been around for quite some time churning out the same old bright ’n’ shiny pop, starting with the wonder that was I’m Like A Bird - which always seemed a little fitting because whenever you saw Nelly elegant twirling her thin little frame around nubile fields it was hard not to think that yes, she did look like a bird. Although it’s possible that it was supposed to be interpreted in an Essex accent – as in, “I’m, like, a bird.” Yes Nelly. You sure are. As for Maneater – well Nelly seems to have decided to release her inner Sexy Beeatch, and the results are great. Maneater is a pop triumph, a nicely scuzzy dirty beat which has Nelly singing along in her I’m-a-bit-Latino-me voice. And she’s saying words like nympho. Hey, where did nice little Nelly go? Sod it, who cares – the results are bloody spectacular, and this is a good soundtrack to do what people do on dance floors these days (you know, move yo ass or shake yo booty and other such occupations. I’ve never quite understood why people bring their donkeys and/or pirate treasure to dance floors, but I guess I’m a bit out of the loop these days). Then there’s the video. Oh my. It starts off with Nelly losing her dog in a dodgy-looking neighbourhood (you know, the trademarked American dodgy neighbourhood – with dirty streets, permanent puddles of rain, overfilled dumpsters and a fire escape against at least one building, which always has to be shot through a wiremesh fence). Anyway her search for the dog takes her into a sort of underground nightclub thing, which is frequented largely by people who look like Motorhead fans. They stare at her expectantly. Nelly stands there, her bourgeois little waist trembling at the situation in which she has found herself (come on, some of them have beards and piercings and everything). Then she starts dancing. And continues dancing. It’s all a bit dark as for some reason the nightclub seems to be lit by flaming torches – I don’t know where this nightclub is supposed to be, but I really want to go. I mean, really. Hell, anything’s better than Copper’s. Come the morning, Nelly has danced her way through the night and comes home to find her ickle dog waiting for her, whereupon she goes back to her nice life. Presumably. This is actually why the sight of her isn’t thoroughly irritating and horrendous as it is when the Pussycat Dolls do it – it’s clear that Nelly’s just playing at being a slapper, she isn’t really advocating it as an empowered lifestyle choice. Plus, she’s also really properly attractive, which helps. The Pussycat Dolls ft. Snoop: Buttons Ah, speaking of the Pussycat Dolls, here they are again. Aren’t we due a break from them by now? They’d already had the standard 3-single release and that’s usually enough for a band to gracefully vanish for a year or so before they come back and bother us with a new album. The Pussycat Dolls seemed to quieten down for a couple of months, and I naturally thought we were done with them. Apparently not. Botheration. Buttons is more of the same, really. Subtlety is not the Dolls’ strong point. There was a time when dirty pop songs relied on the joys of implication – as with I Touch Myself by whoever it was that sang I Touch Myself, which was obviously about – well, that – but the woman was so busy enumerating all the other things she did to herself (she forgot herself, loved herself and probably wet herself on occasion) that it was possible not to notice. Buttons, on the other hand, is based on single-entendres. Loosen up my buttons, baby, but you keep fronting me, saying what you’re gonna do to me but I ain’t seen nothing. The Dolls seem a little ticked off that they’re in the company of someone who actually wants to talk to them and enjoy their company rather than just whipping his lad out and spattering his semen all over their tits there and then – look, I’m sorry, but could someone just make them stop? Right now? It’s bad enough that they’ve slapped a sort of Turkish-sounding beat over the whole thing, but it’s actually less annoying than the Dolls’ inability to think from somewhere other than between their legs for five minutes. Enough. Can we just stop this, please? Would everyone just agree that they have to stop buying their records? If wimpish radio stations the world over decide that Fiddy Cent is a bit too nasty for their playlist, then can the not be wiped off too? It’s one thing to hear a song and not like it. It’s another to have the urge to scrub the inside of your own head out with Dettol in order to remove the thing from your memory. Which means that we have to focus on one of the video’s more intriguing moments. There’s a point at which the Dolls simultaneously squat down, pause, and then thrust themselves upwards. At the same point a sheet of flame emanates from them and extends out over the floor. Presumably this is to emphasise the Dolls’ amazing hotness – which is something they never let us forget. Even in this song the singer flatly states that she’s “a sexy mama” at one point, which is starting to sound a little like she’s inflicting some Pavlovian conditioning on us. It’s like that opening to Hart to Hart, where Max would insist that Mrs H (a long-faced, rather ordinary human being with a hideous haircut) was goigous. But it didn’t work then and it doesn’t now – because no matter how hard I try, I can’t find six women simultaneously lighting their own farts to be attractive. I’m just old-fashioned that way. Oakenfold ft. Brittany Murphy: Faster Kill Pussycat And improbably, there have been two decent songs out in the same month. Actually, sod it – there have been two cracking songs out. First you have Nelly scuzzing it up, and then you’ve got these two churning out something rather fantastic. Which is unexpected – because Brittany Murphy is one of those people who seems to have become a “star” in spite of the fact that she’s terminally useless at her chosen profession (i.e. acting), and is attempting to compensate by acquiring more professions to be rubbish at. As for Paul Oakenfold – well I’ve had a distaste for him ever since all that Little Less Conversation A Little More Action bollocks a few years ago. To be fair, Oakenfold had nothing whatsoever to do with those songs as far as I know, but I was told by a friend that he was and the Pavlovian conditioning is still kicking in. Still, he gets on my tits and that’s all there is to it. I never claimed to be rational. And if all that wasn’t enough, it’s one of those songs which “ft”s someone else. If the band name involves the word “ft.” approach with suspicion (if it involves “vs”, then just write it off there and then). And yet no – this is great, albeit in a packaged sort of way. It sounds a bit like that song by the Bodyrockers (remember them? No, me neither) except where that sounded loud and aggressive, this is pacy and fun. It zips along. The chorus may consist of the words “you turn me on” – not exactly the most inspiring lyrics I’ve ever heard – but hey, this is the musical equivalent of a can of Coke here (not Pepsi). And whatever all the blathering about pussycats means, it does sound good. Particularly when Brittany Murphy rasps it out. And there’s surprise 2: Brittany Murphy can sing. I mean we’re not talking Aretha Franklin here, but since we live in a world where Paris Hilton is managing to forge a career for herself and it doesn’t even sound unusually bad, Brittany’s catapulted herself into reasonable estimation. She’s got a nice husky voice that actually makes her seem quite attractive for a change, like she’s actually someone with a certain level of attitude rather than another Good-Looking-Young-Blonde-Actress clone (this is kind of the point of whether people are “sexy” or not – if they seem into what they’re doing, then it usually works. Janis Joplin had a face that could turn enough milk sour to destroy an entire dairy’s business, but when you saw her singing there was something about her – but when you see strutting-preening-washing-themselves-with-invisible-soap antics of them there Dolls, you just want to buy them a ticket to Amsterdam’s red-light district and be done with it). And somehow, it all works. It’s throwaway stuff, but fun while it lasts. Better than Buttons, then.
	albums The Futureheads: News and Tributes You might remember the Futureheads. They were the crowd who did that kick-ass cover version of Hounds of Love, which took a forgotten Katie Bush number and re-invigorated it as one of the songs of the year. And so it was easy to overlook the rest of the album being Well Not That Good At All Actually, because you simply made the assumption that they were going to get better in the future and besides, if they were smart enough to pick that Katie Bush song and cover it then they were smart enough to make their own half-decent music. So when did this happen? The Futureheads shouldn’t, by any yardstick, be as irritating as they are. They aren’t the strutting, preening arsewipes that are Franz Ferdinand; nor are they the smug, middle-class whiteboy punchbags-in-waiting that make up the Kaiser Chiefs. They’re trying to do something in the jangly-guitar mode, they were singing in their own accents before it became de rigeur for any new band who wanted the Observer Music Monthly to like them, and they don’t seem too bothered about making a PR splash or looking all knowing and clever on Popworld (an irritating programme on Channel 4, for the unitiated) – which I don’t watch much, but whenever I do the Kaiser Chiefs seem to be on it, which results in the not-entirely-pleasant-sight of lots of pop stars and a couple of interviewers trying to out-smug each other about how little they care about any of that stuff. It would be nice if every now and then pop stars would stop trying to be irreverent and come over a bit artistic and broody, or call an interviewer a dirty bastard in the fashion of the Sex Pistols. The only person who got vaguely riled up about being asked if he was a biscuit, what biscuit would he be was Ronan Keating, though, so maybe taking oneself seriously as an artist is a double-edged sword. Anyway; this album isn’t hateful or anything. It’s just… rubbish. I mean it’s really rubbish, in that it’s not even good enough to sound post-modern or knowing or cynical. The Futureheads are very much one of the all-new ain’t-guitars-great bands that sound quite good if you’re not in a bad mood and hear them in a pub or something – but then you’ll go home and play an album by The Gang of Four and remember what “good” actually means. The Futureheads are derivative, yeah, but not in a deliberate way – they’re just not good enough to do anything better than songs they’ve already heard. The single from this album, Skip to the End, is a perfect example – it’s not as aggressively blangly-wangly-hey-look-we-can-play-stuff irritating as the last album, in fact it’s perfectly tolerable really, but it’s just sort of… there. And this is what the problem is with all this guitar-lead stuff – it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The only band who manage to sound consistently new and fresh are The White Stripes, who ironically do it by limiting themselves. The rest sound like they’ve just been exclusively listening to Jam records since birth. So we’ve only got once choice – cross our fingers, trust to luck, and hope The Arctic Monkeys don’t fuck up. Tenuous stuff. Paul Simon: Surprise Which I’ve listened to once, but I can’t remember a damn thing about it. Says it all really. Moving on then. Gomez: How We Operate They used to matter as well, didn’t they? Fancy that. This isn’t actually as endlessly awful as the last one and might spell the beginning of some sort of recovery, but again, I’ve almost completely forgotten what it sounds like. And I listened to this one twice. So it’s probably worth waiting for the next album before seeing if they’ve gotten good again. Primal Scream: Riot City Blues Good old Primal Scream. They’re one of those big important bands who’ve never quite been popular enough to rule the world, but darned if everyone doesn’t know who they are. And with good reason too; listen to something by The Futureheads and then listen to Screamadelica, and we’ll talk. It’s weird to think that albums that are over ten years old can still seem so shockingly new – in much the same way that Joy Division still seem like one of the most important bands around today, even though their lead singer’s a bit too dead for them to put a performance together. Riot City Blues got a hmph-they’re-so-past-it sniffy reception by music journos, and it’s as fundamentally misguided as anyone who makes a decision to become a music journalist. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s fun. It doesn’t try to introduce any weird ‘n’ wonderful trippy moments – which could be when Primal Scream were at their best, but could also be when they sounded most like a pig being put through an industrial mincer – and does leave the listener wondering whether they’re listening to a Rolling Stones tribute band. The fact is that no you bloody well aren’t, you’re listening to a band who aren’t as good as they used to be but still have a damn sight more to them than most of the worthless fuckpieces around today, so get off your high horse and enjoy it. To be fair, the most immediately likeable track on the album is definitely Country Girl, and yes it does sound like the Stones suddenly found the “be good at songwriting” switch on their collectively withering bodies and produced something useful. But that’s not the point, because it’s actually good. You can quote “pastiche” all you like but it sounds great. And Nitty Gritty is good fun too. And all right the next song’s a bit rubbish, but When The Bomb Drops has a nice ominous feel to it and Little Death also has an edge of darkness after a few listens. And then we’re back into oh-let’s-have-fun of 99th Floor, and on it goes. The album is probably a little too long and it doesn’t have the collection of stap-me-vitals-that’s-amazing tracks that would really tie it all together into something really good. But viewing it for what it is – a bit of retro fun scored with the odd dark edge – make it a bloody invigorating listen. If Primal Scream want to have fun in studio I’m not going to stop them, provided the tracks remain sharp and they don’t fuck around. This is well worth your time as a stylish and not-entirely-meaningless entertainment, and anyone who says different will have to go through me.
	Footnotes: - Oh don’t be ridiculous, the next issue will be along in a week or so…